Consumers have in recent times been desirous of eating wholesome and nutritious snack foods. Milk-containing puddings have long been considered nutritious and wholesome foods. Consumers are, however, requiring that the foods they eat, particularly snack food and dessert items, be essentially ready-to-eat. Thus, the amounts of cooked puddings and even instant puddings prepared in the home environment has been decreasing in recent years.
To fill the desire of consumers for dessert or snack items which require no preparation on the part of the consumer, there exists ready-to-eat puddings which are usually marketed in single-service portions. Initially these products were marketed as shelf-stable, canned products. These canned puddings, which have been subjected to a retort step during processing, do not, however, possess the texture and flavor which consumers associate with home-cooked pudding. More recently, single-service portions of refrigerated, pudding products have entered the market.
A process and formulations for preparing aseptically-packaged pudding is described in commonly-assigned, U.S. Pat. No. 4,788,075 to Joseph et al. This patent is hereby incorporated by reference. The Joseph et al. patent describes the preparation of aseptically-packaged pudding which has a creamy texture comparable to cooked pudding and which contains milk solids, fat and relatively low level (below 5%) of a chemically-modified food starch.
Consumers also are desirous of reducing their caloric intake, hence low-fat and no-fat products which have a taste and texture comparable to their full-fat counterparts are much sought after. Unfortunately fat is a highly-functional ingredient in providing texture and mouthfeel and in controlling flavor perception in food products such as puddings. Thus it is not a simple matter to produce low/no fat puddings which are acceptable to the consumer.
Other patents related to the production of aseptically-packaged and/or refrigerated puddings are U.S. Pat. No. 4,906,489 to Flango, Jr. et al. and 4,623,552 to Rapp. U.S. Pat. No. 4,888,194 to Andersen et al. discloses an aseptically-packaged, whippable dairy cream, having a fat content of about 35 to 40% by weight, which is made resistant to syneresis during standing as a whipped foam by the addition of a sodium alginate ingredient.